Chapter 27. External plugins

It is often convenient to be able to keep the build files
used by all your projects in one place. Those files could
be Makefiles, configuration files, templates and more.

Erlang.mk allows you to automatically load plugins from
dependencies. Plugins can do anything, including defining
new variables, defining file templates, hooking themselves
inside the normal Erlang.mk processing or even adding new
rules.

You can load plugins using one of two methods. You can
either load all plugins from a dependency, or just one.
We will also cover conventions about writing external
plugins.

27.1. Loading all plugins from a dependency

To load plugins from a dependency, all you need to do is add
the dependency name to DEP_PLUGINS in addition to the list
of dependencies.

For example, if you have cowboy in DEPS, add cowboy in
DEP_PLUGINS also:

DEPS = cowboy
DEP_PLUGINS = cowboy

This will load the file plugins.mk in the root folder of
the Cowboy repository.

27.2. Loading one plugin from a dependency

Now that we know how to load all plugins, let’s take a look
at how to load one specific plugin from a dependency.

To do this, instead of writing only the name of the dependency,
we will write its name and the path to the plugin file. This
means that writing DEP_PLUGINS = cowboy is equivalent to
writing DEP_PLUGINS = cowboy/plugins.mk.

Knowing this, if we were to load the plugin mk/dist.mk
from Cowboy and no other, we would write the following in
our Makefile:

DEPS = cowboy
DEP_PLUGINS = cowboy/mk/dist.mk

27.3. Writing external plugins

The plugins.mk file is a convention. It is meant to load
all the plugins from the dependency. The code for the plugin
can be written directly in plugins.mk or be separate.

If you are providing more than one plugin with your repository,
the recommended way is to create one file per plugin in the
mk/ folder in your repository, and then include those
individual plugins in plugins.mk.

For example, if you have two plugins mk/dist.mk and
mk/templates.mk, you could write the following plugins.mk
file:

THIS := $(dir $(realpath $(lastword $(MAKEFILE_LIST))))
include $(THIS)/mk/dist.mk
include $(THIS)/mk/templates.mk

The THIS variable is required to relatively include files.

This allows users to not only be able to select individual
plugins, but also select all plugins from the dependency
in one go if they wish to do so.

Plugins can include some help text by extending the target
help-plugins:

27.4. Early-stage plugins

Plugins declared in DEP_PLUGINS are loaded near the end of Erlang.mk.
That’s why you have access to all previously initialized variables.
However, if you want your plugin to add common dependencies to
your applications, a regular is loaded too late in the process.
You need to use "Early-stage plugins". They are declared using the
DEP_EARLY_PLUGINS variable instead. Plugins listed in this variable
are loaded near the beginning of Erlang.mk Otherwise, they work exactly
the same.

If you only give the name of a dependency, the default file loaded is
early-plugins.mk. You can specify a filename exactly like you would
have done it with regular plugins.

27.5. Loading plugins local to the application

If the Erlang.mk plugin lives in the same directory or repository as your
application or library, then you can load it exactly like an external
plugin: the dependency name is simply the name of your application or
library.

For example, the following Makefile loads a plugin in the mk
subdirectory:

DEP_PLUGINS = $(PROJECT)/mk/dist.mk

This also works with early-stage plugins:

DEP_EARLY_PLUGINS = $(PROJECT)/mk/variables.mk

Like external plugins, if you do not specify the path to the plugin, it
defaults to plugins.mk or early-plugins.mk, located at the root of
your application: